David and Ameena

by Ami Rao

  David suppressed a yawn, then glanced around the room quickly to make sure no one had witnessed his act of insurgency. Unlikely, he thought, given how dark the room was. As a matter of fact, now that he was looking around, he noted that everybody in the room looked half-asleep. Once again, unsurprising, given the dull whirring hrrrmmm of the projector, combined with the low lighting, combined with how warm the room was, combined with the same schpiel they heard every Monday morning from Hershel, who, bless his heart, tried so hard to make it sound like they were all an indispensable part of some secret mission to save the planet.

  David worked in advertising, or as they say, ‘on Madison Avenue’, for The Witz Agency, a small, privately owned branding firm fortuitously located (for the sake of its own brand) on Madison Avenue. The agency, named after its founder Hershel Horowitz was a niche but well-regarded establishment that prided itself on working with entrepreneurs and small start-ups to help build, as Hershel liked to call it (the term currently pending patent), ‘disruptive brands.’ Within the firm, David was part of a six-person team that was responsible for strategic planning, aka ‘The Voice of the Consumer’, or as their Founder and CEO so eloquently put it, ‘The Brain of the Agency’. In fact, Hershel was reiterating this very sentiment at that very moment.

  ‘…rely on you lot to come up with ideas. You lot – the brain of the agency. So, show me what you’ve got, people, show me what’s inside you, inside that spectacular brain of yours. Because the brain, at the end of the day, is…’

  It was David’s job to study the triangular puzzle of brand–business–consumer and to put all of this understanding together to come up with inspirational creative briefs that disrupted the status quo and created ‘paradigm shifts’ in the way consumers viewed a product. Say, toilet paper, for example.

  ‘Never forget this fundamental thing, guys. And gals. Not to miss the gals, ha-HAH, the real brains behind everything now, our gals, wouldn’t you agree gentlemen?’ Hershel looked around the room again and, ignoring the vague look of horror on the six faces, continued, ‘Arrrhmm, so as I was saying, never forget this fundamental thing…’

  David took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. One day, he thought magnanimously, one day when he had made it to the big leagues as a truly worthy musician, he would buy a new coffee machine for this place. It would be his gift. Who knows, it might even be a brand of coffee that he had personally worked on bringing to market, which would make it extra-poignant. But until then, he thought with a sigh, it would have to be burned coffee. Actually, burned coffee or nothing, he corrected himself, pushing away his cup and reaching instead for the jug of water in the middle of the table – one always has the choice to not do something. He felt his boss’s eyes on him then, as he was pouring the water into his glass, watching him, betraying some kind of unreadable emotion. But what? David felt sorry for the man suddenly, almost wanting to stand up and sacrifice his own glass of water – have it, he would offer generously, you look like you need it so much more, have it, have all of it and then, you poor little sweaty man, have yourself some more. Hershel had taken out a large paisley handkerchief from his pocket and was dabbing the very top of his smooth pink scalp, from where the sweat seemed to emanate in small, shiny blobs and trickle down his face like tears. Just watching him depressed David. The conference room was stifling. Someone obviously hadn’t accounted for the fact that it had gone from like thirty to ninety overnight.

  Then he thought about Ameena. There was something about her, something different, something cryptic, something he couldn’t quite figure out, an obscure trace of something sudden and sensual. It wasn’t just that she neither looked nor spoke like anyone he’d been with before, though that was true too. It was something else. He shook his head slowly, then allowed himself a small smile. He needed to see her again. He felt intrigued by her, drawn in somehow. And yet she made him nervous, but he didn’t quite understand why. It was like he wanted to get to know her, but slowly, delicately, as if there was a complexity to her that made her impossible to understand in any other way.

  David stretched back into his chair and straightened his legs out, allowing him to reach for the cell phone he kept in his front trouser pocket, a tricky manoeuvre if it was to be executed without attracting undue attention. Stretch-Reach-Grasp-Done. Then, surreptitiously, like some kind of impatient schoolboy with a crush, he positioned it under the conference table and started composing a text message to Ameena.

  ‘“What then is truth?” Nietzsche asked,’ Hershel was saying, arms lifted on either side of his body, palms upward as if he was holding up the world, revealing in the process big, rapidly expanding blotches of wetness under his armpits. ‘A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms…’

  1.11

  Ameena worked as a features assistant at a small fashion magazine with offices on the second floor of a nineteenth-century red-and-white-striped limestone building in Midtown Manhattan.

  The magazine, which Ameena had never heard of until she applied for the job and never read until after she was offered the job, positioned itself as a ‘cool, sexy and pleasingly alternative voice exploring the intersection of fashion and contemporary culture’.

  ‘Our biggest asset is our fearless pursuit of honesty,’ the website boldly proclaimed. ‘We stand apart because we tell the very honest and very personal stories behind brands and their makers; we uncover the personalities under the clothes.’

  This had appealed to Ameena, this whole thing of uncovering the personalities under the clothes. She liked this, the titillation of the ‘what lies beneath’ idea. It made the work sound mysterious. And important.

  On her first day at the magazine, Ameena was told that they hadn’t seen the carpet for two years owing to the returns pile, so she stayed until 10pm every night until she had succeeded in emptying it entirely. She was also told that none of her predecessors had managed to make a decent cup of tea and how excited the whole team was that she was English. And so she discovered, quite quickly after she started, that her job description entailed being part journalist (9%), part writer/editor (15%) and part admin assistant (76%). She also discovered, equally quickly, that she was woefully inadequate at this final part. Walking past a Hallmark shop at the end of her first week, she almost laughed out loud at the big signage that demanded people ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’, because perhaps the most important thing she had learned in her week-long career was that her boss took the small stuff really, really, seriously.

  Whitney Kym, her editrix-in-chief, was a witty, perfectly groomed, extremely intelligent Korean-American woman who dropped movie references, casually churned out 3,000 words an hour and was obsessed with boyfriend jeans, headbands and the backstories that lay beneath the surface of the people she interacted with, wrote about, or worked with.

  This last bit, Ameena had stumbled upon, first-hand.

  When applying for jobs, she had written to several dozen magazines with offices in New York City. She received no reply from any but one.

  This one reply came in email form, from someone called ‘Whim’, from which she could glean nothing at all of the sender, but as she told herself, it didn’t really make a difference.

  ‘I’ve seen your resumé,’ Whim wrote, ‘and your writing samples. They impressed me enough to grab my attention. It’s clear you can write, but I get hundreds of applications from a lot of young people who can write, most of them with far more experience than you. Why not try and get a job in England? Why is it that you want to move to New York? And why us?’

  Ameena emailed back that same evening.

  She’d met a boy, she wrote, many years ago, at one of her parents’ friends’ houses where they had been invited to dinner. The boy was her age and had a congenital nerve condition and wore leg braces and crutches. He had a way about him, she continued, he held court with all the kids at that dinner party. During the course of the evening, he told them
that he had received a letter from a famous doctor in New York, who said he would make the boy walk again. It is a place, the boy said (referring to New York), chin high, voice ringing with confidence, where anything is possible. It is a place of dreams.

  I was ten years old, Ameena wrote, and I thought, about this boy, I thought, he can’t walk, but he has dreams. Compared to him, I had everything, but I had no dreams. So, I started dreaming his dream, I dreamed he would go to New York, I dreamed he would meet this great doctor, I dreamed one day he would walk again. A few years later, we heard from our parents’ mutual friends, the ones who had hosted the dinner party, that he had died from sepsis. The boy never travelled out of Manchester. There was something delusional in his ambition, but it didn’t stop him from dreaming. To answer your first question, I guess I want to move to New York because it was central to the first experience of storytelling that I can remember. To answer your second question, you are really the only one who wrote back.

  ‘You gawn completely crazy, wot?’ Denise had yelled her outrage when Ameena showed her the email. ‘An’ this place wuz your only hope too and you screwin’ it up like this. Girl, don’ you learn nothin’? All this history and you learn nothin’! Honesty an’ truthfulness, they don’ get you shit!’

  Ameena got her job offer the next day.

  The letter was signed Whitney Kym.

  1.12

  The next time they met was on David’s rooftop, the arrangements made hastily by means of a series of text messages that were only slightly flirtatious but more pragmatic than anything else, deliberately so, because it seemed presumptuous, a little bit, to David and to Ameena both, as well as slightly dangerous, to appear too keen too early on in their relationship, not really knowing with certainty what the other felt.

  But then the beginning of every relationship is a leap of faith and one is always unsure, which is also the very thing that makes it exciting – the hoping, the uncertainty of not completely knowing.

  David, being the man, felt it appropriate to send the first message, though Ameena, who didn’t really believe in gender stereotypes of this sort, would probably have done so later that same day or the next, had he not initiated contact, for she had genuinely enjoyed his company the first time. But David, who couldn’t possibly have known any of that, had sent the first text in any case, and it arrived to her in the form of a vibration on her desk, which surprised her, and also came as a sort of relief, as she was editing a particularly cumbersome piece on brogues for women.

  what then is truth, nietzsche asked, the text on Ameena’s phone said, making her laugh out loud.

  A: ‘Supposing truth is a woman?’

  D: very good! didn’t realise you were a writer and an artist and a philosopher

  A: I’m not

  A: That’s the sum total of my knowledge of Nietzsche

  D: good. i was almost not going to ask you out again

  A: Oh?

  D: my boss quotes nietzsche

  A: Oh!

  A: Sorry. I wouldn’t want to remind you…

  D: awful thought. stop there.

  A: ...of your boss

  D: no

  A: No

  D: but of that…

  D: there’s no chance

  D: you’re beautiful

  D: and interesting…

  D: and mysterious…

  D: and many other things…

  A: !!!

  D: on which note…

  A: Yes?

  D: shall we meet again?

  A: Yes

  D: tonight?

  A: Yes

  D: rooftop of my building?

  A: Yes

  D: 9pm?

  A: Yes

  D: see you then

  A: See you then

  And then he texted her the building number and the coordinates, a very New York thing to do, she noted.

  In that way, their second date was arranged.

  David’s building’s rooftop had once been a rooftop bar, after some particularly enterprising entrepreneur had decided it would be a winning business idea to combine Manhattan views with overpriced cocktails and perhaps a bit of atmospheric music to go with it, and that had worked well for a few months and then not so well for the next few. Then to everyone’s great shock, on a balmy summer’s night, a red-headed girl in a red cocktail dress and high heels, also red, who may have consumed far too many of the overpriced cocktails, stepped too far back against the low cement wall and, before anyone could stop her, tumbled backwards and plummeted sixteen storeys to her tragic and untimely death. And so, the time came when the enterprising entrepreneur decided with great sadness, as well as a great hit to his finances, that the price of the cocktails, no matter how ‘over’ they happened to be, simply did not swallow the cost of insuring the space against any further deaths of this nature. So now it was back to being just a rooftop, without the bar.

  This suited David fine because just before Ameena was due to arrive, he set up, on that rooftop, his own little bar, nothing fancy, just a chilled bottle of wine and two glasses and some cheese and crackers and a few green grapes he had picked out from the Bengali fruit-seller on the corner of 3rd Avenue earlier that evening, juicy and plump, a nice addition, he thought, lending colour and character to his platter of cheese and crackers.

  Ameena arrived at two minutes past nine, straight up the elevator to the roof terrace, without a call or a text message stating that she had arrived, which David thought showed a bit of spirit on her part because it is usually expected of people to send some kind of intimation of their arrival, by way of an ‘Almost there!’ or ‘Two minutes away!’ or something to that effect, though to David, the action seemed a wasted effort, serving no practicable purpose, like many other things that people did that were also wasted efforts serving no practicable purpose, but then people did them anyway. And so, he liked this about her, the fact that she didn’t. That she may have done this, or rather not done this, not by any conscious decision-making on her part, but because in her rush (and slight nervousness) she had forgotten her phone at home, did not occur to him once, which was not unusual at all, since we often tend to believe about people what we want to believe. And it was the same way with David.

  She was, he noticed – though hopefully in not too obvious a manner – wearing jeans that hugged her hips and a loose-ish V-neck t-shirt that ended just above the copper button of her jeans. The t-shirt was a deep, dark green and against her eyes and hair, which were both of the deepest, darkest brown, she conjured in his head the image of a forest, dense and shadowy and rich with the smell of pine.

  He, himself, was wearing jeans and a dark grey short-sleeved t-shirt, as the night was warm, and the short sleeves, he hoped, would show off his arms that he had been spending a bit of time and effort over in the gym lately, to make them worthy of being shown off on just the kind of warm night as the one they were in.

  ‘Hi,’ she said as she walked towards him, deliberately delaying her own smile until he smiled.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, and smiled, and then she smiled too, and he offered her some wine, and she nodded, and he poured her a glass, which she took with a ‘Thank you, that’s lovely,’ in her very lovely English way.

  They stood for a while, leaning against the low cement wall, sipping their wine, looking out at the city, and he noticed how her t-shirt showed – but only when the wind blew – the shape of her breasts and the narrow curve of her waist.

  ‘Be careful,’ he said suddenly, ‘don’t lean too far back, someone once fell off that wall, you know.’

  Her eyes widened for a tiny second, but then a small giggle escaped from her before she could hold it in. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said clapping her hand to her mouth, ‘I didn’t mean to laugh, I mean it’s very sad, obviously, dreadful, but your face looks so solemn, it’s really quite comical. Gosh, yo
u must think I’m terrible. You think I’m terrible, don’t you? Maybe I’d just better sit down. And you also.’

  She looked at his face and her giggle grew into a peal of laughter, and he found himself infected by it and then he was laughing, and they were both laughing, uncontrollably laughing, holding their sides and wiping the tears from their eyes, enjoying their guilty pleasure in that quick, quiet moment before morality began to whisper and nag.

  When they finally stopped, she sat down, and he sat down beside her, leaning against the wall, legs stretched out in front of him, then on an impulse he bent the leg that was closest to her so his knee was pressed up against his chin, and in that way, he created a space. For a moment or two, she looked up at his face with complete attention. Then she shifted her body towards him, into the space he had made, and he stretched his leg out again, around her, so she was in the triangle between his legs, her back pressed against his chest, the outside length of her legs touching the inside length of his, her feet stopping somewhere near his mid-calf, his chin resting lightly on top of her head.

  They sat like that for a long time, their bodies fitting into each other, not speaking, and the silence between them was beautiful and intense.

  ‘Do you ever,’ she asked after a while, ‘do you ever find yourself wondering, as you look at all these windows, what is going on in those peoples’ lives?’

  ‘No,’ he said honestly, ‘not really.’

  ‘I do. And then I make up stories about them. The people I see through their windows. Their lives. I make up stories about their lives.’

  She turned her face upwards to look at him. ‘See, that guy there’ – she pointed – ‘yes, that guy sitting by the window in that redbrick building, the one with the geraniums on the windowsill, or they may be petunias, I don’t know anything about flowers, they all look the same in the dark. Anyway, yes that one, that’s my building. Can you see, he’s working on his computer? He’s a writer. Now watch, any minute now, a woman will come into sight and she will lean against his desk – ah, there you go – and she will kiss him. That’s his mistress. She’s called Juliette. She’s French.’